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March 03, 2015

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A+E Networks

Defense Secretary McNamara concedes that the U.S. bombing campaign has had little effect on the North’s “war-making capability.” At the same time, McNamara refuses a request from military commanders to bomb all MIG bases in North Vietnam. In Hanoi, North Vietnam’s Administrative Committee orders all workers in light industry and all craftsmen and their families to leave the city; only persons vital to the city’s defense and production were to remain.

Also on this day

On this day in 1835, the first in a series of six articles announcing the supposed discovery of life on the moon appears in the New York Sun newspaper.
Known collectively as “The Great Moon Hoax,” the articles were supposedly reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science. The byline was Dr....

Influential political philosopher David Hume dies in Edinburgh, Scotland, on this day in 1776.
Although Hume died when the American Revolution was barely underway, his essay “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth” greatly affected the ideas of the drafters of the federal Constitution in 1787. Most famously, James Madison contemplated Hume’s proposals...

The German race car driver Michael Schumacher makes his Formula One (Europe’s top racing circuit) debut in the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa Francorchamps on this day in 1991.
Schumacher was born in Hurth-Hermulhein, West Germany, in 1969. His father managed a go-kart track in the town of Kerpen, and...

On this day in 1864, at the Second Battle of Ream’s Station, Virginia, Confederate troops secure a vital supply line into Petersburg, Virginia, when they halt destruction of the Weldon and Petersburg Railroad by Union troops.
The railroad, which ran from Weldon, North Carolina, was a major supply line for General...

Samantha Smith, the 13-year-old “ambassador” to the Soviet Union, dies in a plane crash. Smith was best known for writing to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov in 1982 and visiting the Soviet Union as Andropov’s guest in 1983. In late 1982, Smith, a fifth-grader at Manchester Elementary School in Manchester, Maine,...

Truman Capote, the author of the pioneering true-crime novel In Cold Blood dies at age 59 in Los Angeles.
In Cold Blood told the story of the 1959 murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, two parolees from the Kansas State Penitentiary, decided to rob...

On this day in 1979, the storm that will become Hurricane David forms near Cape Verde off the African coast in the eastern Atlantic Ocean. It would go on to devastate the island of Dominica, and then the Dominican Republic, killing 1,500 people.
On August 27, two days after forming, the...

Matthew Webb, a 27-year-old merchant navy captain, becomes the first known person to successfully swim the English Channel. Captain Webb accomplished the grueling 21-mile crossing, which really entailed 39 miles of swimming because of tidal currents, in 21 hours and 45 minutes. During the overnight crossing from Dover, England, to...

After more than four years of Nazi occupation, Paris is liberated by the French 2nd Armored Division and the U.S. 4th Infantry Division. German resistance was light, and General Dietrich von Choltitz, commander of the German garrison, defied an order by Adolf Hitler to blow up Paris’ landmarks and burn...

On this day in 2009, Edward “Ted” Kennedy, the youngest brother of President John F. Kennedy and a U.S. senator from Massachusetts from 1962 to 2009, dies of brain cancer at age 77 at his home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. Kennedy, one of the longest-serving senators in American history, was...

The Council of Nicaea, the first ecumenical debate held by the early Christian church, concludes with the establishment of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Convened by Roman Emperor Constantine I in May, the council also deemed the Arian belief of Christ as inferior to God as heretical, thus resolving...

On this day in 1939, The Wizard of Oz, which will become one of the best-loved movies in history, opens in theaters around the United States.
Based on the 1900 children’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum (1856-1919), the film starred Judy Garland as the young Kansas...

Martin Amis, son of novelist Kingsley Amis, is born in Oxford on this day in 1949. Amis’ father is a prominent novelist whose 1954 book, Lucky Jim, an academic satire, brought him international fame.
Martin Amis was the middle of three siblings. He attended 14 schools during the 1950s and 1960s...

Just as pop stardom most often depends on possessing abundant talent and a great capacity for hard work, it also can require being in the right place at the right time. This was certainly true for the diminutive, 17-year-old singer named Eva Narcissus Boyd, who scored her first and only...

The outlaw Bill Doolin is killed by a posse at Lawson, Oklahoma.
Born in Arkansas in 1858, William Doolin was never as hardened a criminal as some of his companions. He went west in 1881, finding work in Oklahoma at the big ranch of Oscar D. Halsell. Halsell took a liking...

On this day in 1950, in anticipation of a crippling strike by railroad workers, President Harry S. Truman issues an executive order putting America’s railroads under the control of the U.S. Army, as of August 27, at 4:00 pm.
Truman had already intervened in another railway dispute when union employees of...

On August 25, 1985, New York Mets pitcher Dwight Gooden becomes the youngest 20-game winner in Major League Baseball history. Gooden was 20 years, nine months and nine days old when he led his Mets over the San Diego Padres 9-3–a month younger than “Bullet” Bob Feller was when he...

U.S. 173rd Airborne Brigade, among the first U.S. ground units sent to Vietnam, ceases combat operations and prepares to redeploy to the United States as part of Nixon’s troop withdrawal plan.
As the redeployment commenced, the communists launched a new offensive to disrupt the upcoming General Assembly elections in South Vietnam....

Over the course of five days, beginning August 25, 1914, German troops stationed in the Belgian village of Louvain during the opening month of World War I burn and loot much of the town, executing hundreds of civilians.
Located between Liege, the fortress town that saw heavy fighting during the first...

On this day in 1944, French General Jacques Leclerc enters the free French capital triumphantly. Pockets of German intransigence remained, but Paris was free from German control.
Two days earlier, a French armored division had begun advancing on the capital. Members of the Resistance, now called the French Forces of the...

On this day in 1945, John Birch, an American missionary to China before the war and a captain in the Army during the war, is killed by Chinese communists days after the surrender of Japan, for no apparent reason.
After America had entered the war, Birch, a Baptist missionary already in...